B(RYAN)~ (TANLEJYO)HNSON was born in 1933, in Hammersmith, West London, of working-class parents. His mother was a former domestic servant; his father a stock-keeper for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. After leaving school in his mid-teens, Johnson worked at various clerical jobs before going on to study English at King’s College, London, and to publish his first novel, Travelling People (1963), with Constable. In all, he produced seven full-length works of fiction (there were numberless side projects, including plays, poems and edited anthologies), certain of whose idiosyncrasies are here appended.